I'm anti-ordinal, and I've been around a lot longer than 5 years.

Fees don't need to be significantly higher than the block reward any time soon. Like, not in the next 15-20 years. The infrastructure and L2 systems were fine evolving alongside very slow and steady L1 volume growth. What this sudden and unexpected volume increase has done is artificially propelled usage forward 10 years or so in volume without the corresponding infrastructure maturity. This use case was unintended and unexpected and so is shocking the system.

Fortunately the Bitcoin system is handling the volume just fine, albeit causing much higher fees which themselves are causing second-order effects, some of which are incentivising an increase in development and usage of the existing L2s.

While there is short-term pain, and I believe that Bitcoin L1 is not the place to build NFT analog tech, I believe this will likely be a long-term benefit for the overall system due to it weathering this attack. The inscriptions market will likely eventually collapse due to being priced out of the blockspace market, so I see it as a doomed ecosystem.